Tuesday, February 15, 2011

"Drip City"

They don’t do it much anymore. It’s embarrassing now. We’re far too sophisticated for the button-pushing blatancy. It is believed.

Irony rules. And where there’s irony, there’s no place for blubbering. Knowing smirks, yes, but no blubbering.

Especially mechanically evinced blubbering. It’s okay to cry when they take Anne Frank away. That really happened. But fictional tearjerkery?

Gimme a break.

They made fun of this kind of thing in Sleepless In Seattle (1993). It was a “the men versus the women”, scene the women acknowledging the glorious weepfest that is the climactic scene in An Affair To Remember, the men parodying such foolishness, recreating the “emotional outpouring” over Jim Brown’s being cut down in a hail of bullets during the payoff scene in The Dirty Dozen. It was arguably Sleepless in Seattle’s funniest moment. Though as I recall, that Jim Brown moment was really sad.

Of course, that’s me. I’m a total sucker for movie sentimentality. A boy’s dog comes home, and I’m reaching for the Kleenex. The bandages come off, and they can see – and the floodgates are open!

I wrote recently about the original True Grit, mentioning its last scene, wherein an aging John Wayne, playing “Rooster Cogburn”, first brays “Come see an old fat man sometime”, and then clears a three-rail fence on horseback in what sensibly should have been his swansong as a western movie legend. The scene moved me.

It would have moved me even more if it hadn’t been so carelessly put together – John Wayne galloping toward the fence and taking off; a long shot of some stunt man jumping the fence, intercut – and here’s where it really gets awful – with a terribly edited “cut-in” of what appears to be “The Duke” whooping it up on horseback, but looks suspiciously like John Wayne rocking back and forth on a ladder, simulating being on horseback – and then a return to a long shot, as the stunt man lands the horse safely on the other side.

That kind of messed up the moment.

A sentimental moment executed impeccably? Check out the final scene of Ride The High Country (1962). Two aging cowboys this time – yeah, cowboys again – Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, both acting in their final movie ever. Straight shooting McCrea lies on the ground, mortally wounded, as a grieving Scott, who’d been planning to double-cross McCrea but had come to his senses in the end, stands over him. There’s a seven-word parting exchange, laconically appropriate for the venerable buckaroos:

“So long, partner.”

“Ah’ll see ya laydah.”

Scott heads away, as the dying McCrea lowers himself slowly out of frame.

Cue the waterworks.

I know it’s all subjective. One viewer’s “moving moment” is another’s “Let me outta here.” But when they work, they work. And none more powerfully than a late scene in the baseball fantasy, Field of Dreams (1989).

A guy builds a ballpark in his Iowa cornfield, and, as was whispered in his ear, if he built it they would come, they did. Who came were the ghosts of ballplayers of the past, resurrected for a final sampling at the pastime they revered. Among the returning ghosts was the male lead character’s ballplayer father. In life, the two had never gotten along.

But now it was different. It was their last chance at connecting. As the dead Dad is about to leave, evaporating out of the cornfield into who knows where, the lead character, afraid he might never see him again, agonizes over what he should do. His wife suggests,

“Introduce him to your daughter.”

If your dad is dead, and you have a young daughter – mine is, and I did; in 1989, she was six – that moment just tears you to pieces. Not just sobbing. Primal moaning, and gasps for breath.

Examples will vary, relative to differing sensibilities. But those ones work on me.

A final pondering. Sometimes, it’s easier to cry at sentimental claptrap than at the real thing.

My Dad, who swore he's never watched a movie since the original Godfather, and has the emotional articulacy of a stone, watched Field of Dreams and was mesmerized. The whole Father-Son dynamic blew him away - for the duration of the film, then he went back to being a cold fish. So yes, movies can move us in ways that real life never does. Same for me, I can happily blub at a heart-wrenching scene but with real-life trauma, I'd rather make notes so I might one day be able to use it in a script.

WP Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe, which Hollywood calls Field of Dreams, is one of Canada's best known writers. He's one of my favorite authors. Kinsella originally titled his book, Dream Field, but his publisher changed it. I brought up Kinsella's nationality only because of the wording in which Ray Kinsella asked his father to play catch. In the states, we would use those words, 'want to play catch?' But in Shoeless Joe, Ray asks his dad, 'want to have a catch?', which I assume is the way the writer Kinsella asked when he was growing up in or near Edmonton. Maybe Mr. P. can address that.

A few years before the release of Field of Dreams, The Natural was the feel good movie. It too ended with the hero, Roy Hobbs, playing catch with his son, as Glen Close watched. (I believe it opened w/Roy playing catch w/his dad, but I'm not positive.)

For my father and myself, it was always baseball that kept us communicating, civilly. Much like the Kinsellas, we'd argue about everything else, but baseball was our common bond. When he saw the movie, he was visibly touched when Ray and his dad - John - finally got to have a catch. As was I.

The character name Ray Kinsella, likely came from a JD Salinger story called A Young Girl in 1941With No Waist at All. In The Catcher in the Rye, there was a character named Richard Kinsella. In the novel, Shoeless Joe, Ray Kinsella has a twin brother named Richard. Maybe some of that will eventually turn up in a Trivial Pursuit edition.

In "Shenandoah" when James Stewart's youngest boy, thought lost, returns from the Civil War and appears in the church at movie's end. In "The Best Years Of Our Lives" when Fredric March returns from overseas duty and is reunited with Myrna Loy. In "Casablanca" when Victor Laszlo asks the band to play "La Marseillaise" to drown out singing Nazi soldiers. Seen those scenes a dozen times and choke up every time.